Recommended Tools

​This page details all of the various tools I use to plan, build and execute online marketing campaigns for both personal and client projects. I personally use each of these tools every time I sit down at my work station. I thought it would be a helpful resource for anyone wanting to start a new blog or looking for new tools to help them scale their online business.

I will be updating this page periodically to include new tools I've tested and added to my arsenal :) I will also be writing comprehensive tutorials for each of the tools on the list.

Below you will find a table of contents to quickly navigate to specific sections.

Recommended Hosting Companies

There are a number of hosting options out there. The one you choose will largely depend on where you are with your business. If you're just starting, a cheap shared hosting provider will serve you fine. If you're website is paying the bills, you should opt for a dedicated hosting solution.

I use Bluehost for almost every single one of my websites. Why? Because it's incredibly easy to use with 1-click automatic WordPress installation. The customer service is excellent too - both phone and chat support. Bluehost will also handle your email hosting which is very helpful. You can use the same hosting account for multiple domains if you plan on creating multiple websites. This is a great cost-effective shared hosting solution for smaller websites.

Page load speed not only has a big impact on your search engine rankings, it can make or break your on-site conversions. I moved hosting over to WPX Hosting and cut my site load speed in half overnight! They are fully compatible with WooCommerce, run on super fast SSD servers, provide daily backups, PHP caching, unlimited email accounts and are co-located in the world's largest data center. They have ultra-fast support and will even migrate your website (and upgrade it to HTTPS) for free.

Plans start at $24.99/ month (or $250/yr if you pay for the whole year at once). A no-brainer if your site has grown out of a basic hosting package.

Kinsta is a managed WordPress host focused on providing high-performance, scalability, and availability. They are powered by Google Cloud Platform and typically deal with enterprise and ultra high-traffic sites.

Their clients include Ubisoft, Mint, Intuit, Drift, and GE. They are able to completely isolate each WordPress site and auto scale for sudden traffic surges. Kinsta runs on the latest technology - HTTP/2, PHP 7.1, MariaDB, Let’s Encrypt, Git, and one-click staging environments.

The support team is made up of WordPress developers which allows them to provide awesome 24×7 support. They also offer free migrations.

Plans start at $100/ month (or $1,100/yr if you pay for the whole year at once).

Recommended Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress powers 21% of the web. Why? It's flexible, open source, super easy to use and has an army of developers out there building plugins that make it easier to use every single day. These plugins add functionalities to your website without needing to hire an expensive programmer. As mentioned above, Bluehost (and many other hosting companies) offer one-click WordPress installs which makes it super easy to get your site up and running in little time.

Recommended Visual Editor

This is one of my secret weapons. Not only does Thrive have some amazing conversion-centered themes, they also have a visual editor plugin that makes it incredibly easy to make beautiful landing pages, optimized for conversion. It's simple drag-and-drop interface allows you to quickly add every element imaginable to your site without ever needing to write a single line of code. I've used it for everything from video sales pages to blog post reviews. Thrive even provides pre-built templates ready for you to simply drop your content into and hit publish. As you can tell, I'm pretty excited about this one :)

Tools to make your site faster

A CDN (content delivery network) will help make your site load faster around the world. This is really important. The further your users are from your server, the slower your site loads. This can hurt you a lot if you have readers in different countries. A content delivery network will keep a copy of your site and serve it from the closest server to your reader. This makes page load MUCH faster. I highly recommend using the free CDN listed below:

Cloudflare is the largest CDN company in the world with servers spread across every corner of the globe. They are also the only free provider of CDN services. It can dramatically increase your site speed (up to 35% faster) and only takes a few minutes to set up. You can install it as a WordPress plugin too.

Recommended Social Media Tools

Buffer is the complete social media management tool. Manage all your main social media accounts in one place. Schedule content and collaborate with teams. Use the tool's browser extension to schedule and publish fresh content on-the-go. It also provides a URL shortener with analytics and reports to quickly see which posts are generating the most engagement. The new Pablo tool is integrated within Buffer so you can make professional looking images and designs to help your posts stand out in busy social media feeds. The complete package.

Social Quant is a tool that allows you to rapidly grow your Twitter audience with relevant followers, increase engagement, boost brand awareness and generate more leads for your business. You can monitor progress from your own custom dashboard and optimize your account to accelerate audience growth. I have grown my Twitter audience by over 4,000 followers in the last 6 weeks and am currently collecting 45 new followers a day! Referral traffic and engagement has increased. Twitter is now my fourth highest converting channel.

The tagline says it all, "Attach A Call-To-Action To Every Link You Share". Snip.ly is one of the coolest social media tools I've come across in a long time. It's used by big brands and online marketing experts such as Neil Patel. Basically, you take the URLs of curated content and generated a "snipped" URL. When someone clicks the link after you share it on social media they will be taken to the website you curated the content from, but a CTA will show at the bottom of the screen. It can be a link back to your site, an opt-in form and even provides UTM tracking, A/B testing and retargeting. It is a simple way to use other people's content to drive more traffic back to your site.

Recommended SEO Tools

SEMrush is my swiss army knife when it comes to competitor analysis and keyword research for both SEO and PPC campaigns. I'm able to plug in the URL of any of my competitors and find out how much organic and paid traffic they are getting, which keywords they are ranking for, the ad copy they are using as well as the landing pages they're using to convert traffic. I can completely dissect their online strategies with a single tool. I use it every single day!

But don't just take my word for it. SEMrush was just rated #1 keyword research tool by 61 marketing experts, ranked as the top overall﻿ seo tool by 143 search marketing professionals, and recently topped the leaderboard as the best organic search and PPC competitor analysis tool.

I wrote a comprehensive case outlining 24 ways I use SEMrush to spy on my competitors and build rock solid SEO and PPC campaign campaigns.

Ahrefs has the best link index out there. I use this every day to perform technical audits, deconstruct my competitor's backlink profiles and build my own backlinks in combination with BuzzStream (listed below). Simply enter a URL and you'll be to quickly see all the links and referring domains pointing the website, identify the top content types and topics by link count, finding link intersects between multiple sites, perform domain comparisons, quickly identify and disavow toxic links.

This tool forms the foundation of all my link building campaigns and pays for itself over and over again, even if you only use half it's functionality. The tool is continually adding exciting features and quickly putting a lot of distance between itself and other link analysis tools on the market.

Long Tail Pro is an extremely powerful tool that will help you scale your keyword research and unearth thousands of profitable long tail keywords. The tool will find up to 800 keywords per seed keyword entered. Find out how many people are searching for long tail keyword variations each month, analyze the top 10 results in Google for each keyword, look at SERP data like keyword usage in Title and meta tags, domain and page authority, Moz rank, # of backlinks and the amount people are bidding on each keyword on platforms such as Google AdWords.

Build hyper-targeted lists by filtering by keyword, suggested CPC bid, local and global monthly search volume and level of competition. Watch the video on this page to see how Long Tail Pro finds 3,800+ money-making keywords in seconds.

Gmass is a powerful low-cost alternative to more expensive outreach tools like BuzzStream. It allows users to perform mass email, mail merges, and auto follow-up from Gmail and Inbox.

The tool syncs up with your Google sheet data. I've been using it to manage all the outreach campaigns on the blog for the past 3 months and absolutely love it. It has a handy reporting feature built in as well so you can see who is opening and clicking on your emails.

If you want to build quality white hat backlinks to your website, then BuzzStream is for you. This tool will add jet fuel to your outreach and link building campaigns. What is it? Buzzstream is a CRM that allows you to quickly automate and scale your outreach efforts for guest posting, broken link building, content promotion and relationship building. I use this tool every time I want to promote﻿ or build links to a piece of content I've published. Extremely powerful tool!

Recommended Email Marketing Software

I just moved over to ConvertKit from GetResponse, and I'm very impressed with the tool. ConvertKit was built to meet the specific needs of professional bloggers, vloggers and authors. The UI is extremely user-friendly, the drag-and-drop automations are more powerful, and they even migrated all my content and drip campaigns over for free.

But, one of the main reasons I switched to ConvertKit was because it allowed me to connect multiple lead magnets to a single automation series without having to create separate landing pages and campaigns for each one. I also wanted an email platform that would provide all the tagging, segmentation and automation components to launch a product. ConvertKit provides all that and more, and the costs are very comparable to inferior products on the market. Highly recommended!

Recommended Tools For Converting Your Audience

Now that you have a fast-loading, beautiful website, you're building links, promoting content and generating traffic, you need to turn those visitors into leads and customers. The best way to do this is to capture email addresses, nurture and build relationships with your leads so they trust you enough to buy from you. Here are the two tools I'm using to get 7% conversion rates and collect hundreds of engaged email subscribers every month on autopilot:

If you could only get one tool on this entire list, Thrive Leads would be it! This tool has taken my list building to an entirely new level. My popup is converting at 7.4% and I've managed to collect 1,124 new emails in the 60 days since installing the plugin (view the full Thrive Leads review). The tool allows you to create opt in popups, header bars, slide ins, in-post forms, lead links, sidebar forms while targeting them to specific parts of your website (categories, pages, post types, tags etc). This is perfect for content upgrades. On top of that, the plugin provides a powerful A/B testing engine. For example, you can test based on exit intent, scroll depth, page load, time on site and more. And, it's super easy!If you're serious about converting traffic into email subscribers check this tool out now!

Sumo is another great tool I've used to build my email list. My favorite list building tool from the Sumo suite is the Welcome Mat. I've captured almost 7,000 emails with that tool alone over the last two years.

The thing I like about Sumo is not only do they offer a ton of different list building tools - Welome Mat, Popups, Scroll Bars, Header Bars, embedded forms, light boxes, link triggers etc - all in one place, but you can get started for free.

However, to get access to all the powerful targeting, testing, templates and reporting features, you'll need to pay a monthly fee.

Recommended Tools For Content Promotion

Snappa makes it incredibly easy to build custom graphics for blog posts, social media and ads of all dimensions without Photoshop or graphic designers. The tool has hundreds of pre-built templates and beautiful stock photos to choose. You can also upload your own images, customize the templates or simply start from scratch. This tool saves me countless hours every month.

I love this app from Noah Kagan and the team at SumoMe. It allows you to add social share icons that stick to the page as the reader scrolls down the page and display nicely on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. You can select from 16 different social media channels and enable smart mode to have your most popular social icons display on a per page basis. This increases social proof and helps boost engagement. I've managed to generate over 11,000 social shares with this app :) I can't believe it's still free!

Final Words

There are a bunch of tools listed here. I understand that many of them have a cost and some of you may not have a big budget to start with. I tried to include as many cheap/free but great tools as possible. However, the power of the premium tools listed above cannot be ignored. Some of these tools will help you trip the size of your business in a very short period of time. I personally use every tool listed above for both personal and client projects.

In the near future, I'll be writing dedicated reviews/ case studies for each tool and linking to it from the list. If you have any questions about any of the tools listed above please reach out to me here. I reply to every email.